Restaurant Placemats

Business At A Glance

Startup Costs: $2,000 - $10,000

Home Based: Can be operated from home.

Part Time: Can be operated part-time.

Franchises Available? No

Online Operation? No

Business Overview

Like restaurant menus, many restaurant owners are more than happy to have community businesses featured on their table placemats in exchange for receiving the placemats for free. Here is how the business works. Assume that a busy 50-seat restaurant would use 200 paper placemats each day or approximately 6,000 per month, and the cost to print 6,000 black and white placemats on color paper would be around 10 cents each, or a total of $600. Furthermore, the placemats would feature 16 business card-sized display advertisements around the outside of the placemat, while the inside of the placemat would feature trivia questions. Charging local merchants a mere 1.5 cents per advertisement, per placemat would generate total sales of $1,440 per restaurant each month, or a gross profit of $840. Now times that by ten restaurants, and you would have a great little advertising business generating sales in excess of $100,000 per year.